Introduction

Overview

LiteSpeed Web Server is an Apache-interchangeable, high performance, secure, easy-to-use web server.
It can handle thousands of concurrent connections with a small memory footprint.
Its security features also make it much less vulnerable to various attacks.

Unlike other lightweight web servers, Apache-compatible per-directory configuration
overrides are fully supported by LiteSpeed web Server. These .htacess files
allow you (or your users) to change configurations for any directory under the
document root on the fly. This is a must-have for shared hosting.

Using .htaccess in LiteSpeed Web Server will not degrade the server's performance.
Compare that to Apache's 40% drop in performance when .htaccess files are used.

Security

LiteSpeed Web Server provides the following security features:

SSL

Supports SSLv3/TLSv1. This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project
for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/)

IP Level Throttling

Network bandwidth and request rate for a single IP address can be limited
regardless of the number of connections.

Comprehensive Connection Accounting

Comprehensive control of concurrent connections allowed from a single IP address.

LiteSpeed Web Server prevents bad CGI scripts from overloading the server by
limiting the system resources CGI applications can consume.

suEXEC and chroot CGI/Fast CGI

LiteSpeed Web Server can run CGI scripts and Fast CGI applications in a chroot jail or a different user/group ID, minimizing possible damages from vulnerable scripts.

DoS Attack Prevention

LiteSpeed Web Server is much less vulnerable to HTTP Denial of Service(DoS)
and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks thanks to IP-level throttling,
connection accounting, and its outstanding performance and scalability.

Chroot [Enterprise Edition only]

LiteSpeed Web Server can run in a chroot jail.

Reliability

LiteSpeed Web Server recovers from crashes instantly. LiteSpeed Web Server also runs completely in user space.
Thus the server can easily switch between different versions without affecting the reliability of the operating system.

CGI, Fast CGI and Servlet engine run in their standalone processes, the
reliability of web server is not affected by the quality of third party software.

User Friendly

No need to build the executable yourself.

Easy to install.

Easy to control and configure through the WebAdmin interface.

Sets up PHP and PHP accelerators automatically.

Applies most changes without restarting the server.

Compatibility

LiteSpeed Web Server is designed to be interchangeable with Apache, the most popular server software
on the Web. LiteSpeed web server can even run directly from Apache's
configuration files.

LiteSpeed Web Server also uses the same syntax for distributed configuration
files (.htacess) and URL rewrite rules, which makes migration as easy as
setting the LiteSpeed Web Server document root to the same directory as Apache.